Which Micro-blogging Program to Use?
This seems like a few years ago when the IM “wars” were going on. Every other day it seemed that there was a new IM program on the block that was stealing the thunder from the big IM three (MSN, AIM, and Yahoo). To this day, the big 3 are still doing just fine and even a company like Google couldn’t dent it much. This is because once people chose a platform, they were unlikely to switch to a new one but they might sign for an account on it. Until the multichat clients came around, it was common to have 2-3 IM clients running at a given time. Well, I personally am interested in avoiding this problem with micro-blogging.
I now see a new “big 3″ in the micro-blogging taking control, Twitter, Jaiku and Pownce. It is early enough in the game that some people havn’t made their final decision, so I am curious about what people are using and why they are using that instead of the others. My goal out of this post is to hopefully gather people onto one platform so they and myself only have one thing to monitor. Some things that would be nice is a client that I can install on my machine that doesn’t cost too much (or anything), isn’t too buggy and is not very resource intensive.
So have at it in the comments, which system do you/would you like to use and why?
Note: I know that Pownce and Jaiku are invite only right now, but as a member of both, I have enough invites to get people going and spreading them around, so don’t have that be an issue for this discussion, please.
Tags: jaiku, micro-blogging, pownce, twitter
December 8th, 2007 at 4:26 pm
I like Pownce (pronounced POUNCE) the best. I’ve had some success already in getting people to join it.
I like it because you can send files, links, pictures, and event events. The links and pictures show up really well.
December 9th, 2007 at 6:46 pm
Some questions for Ben.
Do you use the AIR client at all or only the web interface? If only the web interface, how do you keep up on it?
How often do you send files, links, pictures and events?
Can it be configured to update when you update your blog?
December 10th, 2007 at 11:51 am
I see what you’re getting at here, you’re trying to lure me back to the sticky confines of Jaiku, but let me attempt to answer your questions without becoming ensnared:
1) I have not used the AIR client. I breathe AIR, I don’t need it installed on my computer. Instead, I have grouped Pownce in with the other websites I open in FireFox every morning when I come in to work, or boot up the ol’ computer when at home: a) Gmail, b) Google Reader, and c) webarnold.net’s wordpress dashboard. If there was a nice, non-AIR based client to install, I would consider - something written in Microsoft Silverlight, perhaps?
2) I haven’t sent files yet, I send links and pictures/youtube videos pretty often and they look great!
3) As far as I know, no… you can’t insert events from external, non pownce sources. That being said, I haven’t played with the AIR client at all, who knows if that lets you insert external feeds…
December 10th, 2007 at 12:58 pm
The inability to have events from external sources is kind of a big one. I have been using Jaiku and it updates with every blog post, Flickr update, etc. It doesn’t support YouTube or image embedding, but the Flickr update does include an image preview.
December 10th, 2007 at 1:07 pm
I think Pownce’s value is only realized in workgroup settings where you need to shuttle screenshots and links around a small group of people (similar to what Campfire does, really). This isn’t surprising, since that was the need it was originally developed to address.
I use twitter because it’s easy and most of my friends use it. The service sucks at times, but I can live with missing the occasional update about the kind of peanut butter Ocu-Thomps is eating.
December 10th, 2007 at 1:53 pm
Pownce has far and away the best web interface, in my opinion, one other reason I’ve stuck with it.
Who knows, Jaiku might come up with some interesting things now that Google has purchased it. If they do something interesting there, I may be persuaded to go all Jaiku.